Hennessy, Mark and Power, James F.
(2005)
An Analysis of Rule Coverage as a Criterion in Generating
Minimal Test Suites for GrammarBased
Software.
In:
ASE '05 International Conference on Automated Software Engineering 2005.
ACM, pp. 7-11.
ISBN 1581139934
Abstract
The term grammar-based software describes software whose
input can be specified by a context-free grammar. This
grammar may occur explicitly in the software, in the form
of an input specification to a parser generator, or implicitly,
in the form of a hand-written parser, or other inputverification
routines. Grammar-based software includes not
only programming language compilers, but also tools for
program analysis, reverse engineering, software metrics and
documentation generation. Such tools often play a crucial
role in automated software development, and ensuring their
completeness and correctness is a vital prerequisite for their
use.
In this paper we propose a strategy for the construction
of test suites for grammar based software, and illustrate this
strategy using the ISO C++ grammar. We use the concept of
rule coverage as a pivot for the reduction of implementationbased
and specification-based test suites, and demonstrate
a significant decrease in the size of these suites. To demonstrate
the validity of the approach, we use the reduced test
suite to analyze three grammar-based tools for C++. We
compare the effectiveness of the reduced test suite with the
original suite in terms of code coverage and fault detection.
| Item Type: |
Book Section
|
| Additional Information: |
This is the postprint version of the published article which is available at DOI: 10.1145/1101908.1101926 |
| Keywords: |
Software testing; grammar-based software; test suite reduction; rule coverage; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science |
| Item ID: |
6409 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1145/1101908.1101926 |
| Depositing User: |
Dr. James Power
|
| Date Deposited: |
24 Sep 2015 15:58 |
| Publisher: |
ACM |
| Refereed: |
No |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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